Dead Man's Poker

By Giles Tippette

When it comes to Western fiction, acclaimed writer Giles Tippette hits the bull’s eye every time . . .

Saloon owner Wilson Young doesn’t need the law to take care of business. But when he takes a train down to Galveston to look up a gambler who owes him a fat debt, he gets paid with a bullet in his chest. After getting out of the scrape alive—barely—Young heads back to San Antone to mend up. And plan his revenge. And draw on his outlaw past to settle a score—one bullet at a time.
 
Praise for Giles Tippette
 
“Tippette can plot away with the best of them.”—Dallas Morning News

“Like True Grit . . . a small masterpiece . . . brilliantly written.” —Newark News

“Spine-jarring, bullet-biting intensity.”—Houston Post

“Tough, gutsy, and fascinating.”—NY Newsday

“Impressive authenticity.”—Booklist

“His fiction is taught and gripping.”—Houston Spectator

“Tippette can write rough and tumble action superbly.”—Chattanooga Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lyrical Press
• Release date: Dec 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781601838155

Giles Tippette

A lifelong Texan, Giles Tippette was a rodeo cowboy (the basis for his 1972 novel The Brave Men), owned a gold mine, worked as a mercenary pilot (which inspired his acclaimed 1975 novel The Mercenaries), and as columnist for Sports Illustrated and Texas Monthly.                                                                                                                                                                  He turned to writing westerns in the 1970s and quickly developed a loyal following. His 1971 western, The Bank Robber, was made into the 1974 movie The Spikes Gang, starring Lee Marvin and Ron Howard. When asked if he enjoyed the movie version of his novel, Tippette commented, “I don’t know. I didn’t see it.” His other westerns include The Sunshine Killers (optioned by Clint Eastwood), The Texas Bankrobbing Company, Bad News, Jailbreak, Cherokee, Crossfire, Dead Man’s Poker, Gunpoint, Hard Luck Money, Hard Rock, Heaven’s Gold, Sixkiller, The Horse Thieves, Southwest of Heaven, and the popular Wilson Young series, which included Wilson’s Choice, Wilson’s Gold, Wilson’s Revenge, and Wilson’s Woman.   Mystery Scene magazine said of Tippette’s work, “He writes crime novels set in the Wild West. His books are gritty, violent, and show the American west in all its harsh beauty.” Mr. Tippette passed away in 2001 and, per his last request, was cremated and had his ashes spread over his first love, West Texas.

Book preview

978-1-6018-3815-5

CHAPTER 1

I was hurt, though how badly I didn’t know. Some three hours earlier I’d been shot, the ball taking me in the left side of the chest about midway up my rib cage. I didn’t know if the slug had broken a rib or just passed between two of them as it exited my back. I’d been in Galveston, trying to collect a gambling debt, when, like a fool kid, I’d walked into a setup that I’d ordinarily have seen coming from the top of a tree stump. I was angry that I hadn’t collected the debt, I was more than angry that I’d been shot, but I was furious at myself for having been suckered in such a fashion. I figured if it ever got around that Wilson Young had been gotten that easy, all of the old enemies I’d made through the years would start coming out of the woodwork to pick over the carcass.

But, in a way, I was lucky. By rights I should have been killed outright, facing three of them as I had and having nothing to put me on the alert. They’d had guns in their hands by the time I realized it wasn’t money I was going to get, but lead.

Now I was rattling along on a train an hour out of Galveston, headed for San Antonio. It had been lucky, me catching that train just as it was pulling out. Except for that, there was an excellent chance that I would have been incarcerated in Galveston and looking at more trouble than I’d been in in a long time. After the shooting I’d managed to get away from the office where the trouble had happened and make my way toward the depot. I’d been wearing a frock coat of a good quality linen when I’d sat down with Phil Sharp to discuss the money he owed me. Because it was a hot day, I took the coat off and laid it over the arm of the chair I was sitting in. When the shooting was over, I grabbed the coat and the little valise I was carrying and ducked and dodged my way through alleyways and side streets. I came up from the border on the train so, of course, I didn’t have a horse with me.

But I did have a change of clothes, having expected to be overnight in Galveston. In an alley I took off my bloody shirt, inspected the wound in my chest, and then wrapped the shirt around me, hoping to keep the blood from showing. Then I put on a clean shirt that fortunately was dark and not white like the one I’d been shot in. After that I donned my frock coat, picked up my valise, and made my way to the train station. I did not know if the law was looking for me or not, but I waited until the train was ready to pull out before I boarded it. I had a round-trip ticket so there’d been no need for me to go inside the depot.

I knew I was bleeding, but I didn’t know how long it would be before the blood seeped through my makeshift bandage and then through my shirt and finally showed on my coat.

All I knew was that I was hurting and hurting bad and that I was losing blood to the point where I was beginning to feel faint. It was a six-hour ride to San Antonio, and I was not at all sure I could last that long. Even if the blood didn’t seep through enough to call it to someone’s attention, I might well pass out. But I didn’t have many options. There were few stops between Galveston and San Antonio, it being a kind of a spur line, and what there were would be small towns that most likely wouldn’t even have a doctor. I could get off in one and lay up in a hotel until I got better, but that didn’t much appeal to me. I wanted to know how bad I was hurt, and the only way I was going to know that was to hang on until I could get to some good medical attention in San Antone.

I was Wilson Young, and in that year of 1896, I was thirty-two years old. For fourteen of those years, beginning when I was not quite fifteen, I had been a robber. I’d robbed banks, I’d robbed money shipments, I’d robbed high-stakes poker games, I’d robbed rich people carrying more cash than they ought to have been, but mostly I’d robbed banks. But then, about four years past, I’d left the owlhoot trail and set out to become a citizen that did not constantly have to be on the lookout for the law. Through the years I’d lost a lot of friends and a lot of members of what the newspapers had chosen to call my gang—the Texas Bank Robbing Gang in one headline.

I’d even lost a wife, a woman I’d taken out of a whorehouse in the very same town I was now fleeing from. But Marianne hadn’t been a whore at heart; she’d just been kind of briefly and unwillingly forced into it in much the same way I’d taken up robbing banks.

I had been making progress in my attempt to achieve a certain amount of respectability. At first I’d set up on the Mexican side of the border, making occasional forays into Texas to sort of test the waters. Then, as a few years passed and certain amounts of money found their way into the proper hands, I was slowly able to make my way around Texas. I had not been given a pardon by the governor, but emissaries of his had indicated that the state of Texas was happy to have no further trouble with Wilson Young and that the past could be forgotten so long as I did nothing to revive it.

And now had come this trouble. The right or wrong of my position would have nothing to do with it. I was still Wilson Young, and if I was in a place where guns were firing and men were being shot, the prevailing attitude was going to be that it was my doing.

So it wasn’t only the wound that was troubling me greatly; it was also the worry about the aftermath of what had begun as a peaceful and lawful business trip. If I didn’t die from my wound, there was every chance that I would become a wanted man again, and there would go the new life I had built for myself. And not only that life of peace and legality, but also a great deal of money that I had put into a business in Del Rio, Texas, right along the banks of the Rio Grande. Down there, a stone’s throw from Mexico, I owned the most high-class saloon and gambling emporium and whorehouse as there was to be found in Texas. I had at first thought to put it on the Mexican side of the river, but the mordida, the bribes, that the officials would have taken convinced me to build it in Texas, where the local law was not quite so greedy. But now, if trouble were to come from this shooting, I’d have to be in Mexico, and my business would be in Texas. It might have been only a stone’s throw away, but for me, it might just as well have been a thousand miles. And I’d sunk damn near every cent I had in the place.

My side was beginning to hurt worse with every mile. I supposed it was my wound, but the train was rattling around and swaying back and forth like it was running on crooked rails. I was in the last car before the caboose, and every time we rounded a curve, the car would rock back and forth like it was fixing to quit the tracks and take off across the prairie. Fortunately, the train wasn’t very crowded and I had a seat to myself. I was sort of sitting in the middle of the double cushion and leaning to my right against the wall of the car. It seemed to make my side rest easier to stretch it out like that. My valise was at my feet, and with a little effort, I bent down and fumbled it open with my right hand. Since my wound had begun to stiffen up, my left arm had become practically useless—to use it would almost put tears in my eyes.

I had a bottle of whiskey in my valise, and I fumbled it out, pulled the cork with my teeth and then had a hard pull. There was a spinsterish middle-aged lady sitting right across the aisle from me, and she give me such a look of disapproval that I thought for a second that she was going to call the conductor and make a commotion. As best I could, I got the cork back in the bottle and then hid it out of sight between my right side and the wall of the car.

Outside, the terrain was rolling past. It was the coastal prairie of south Texas, acres and acres of flat, rolling plains that grew the best grazing grass in the state. It would stay that way until the train switched tracks and turned west for San Antonio. But that was another two hours away. My plan was to get myself fixed up in San Antone and then head out for Del Rio and the Mexican side of the border just as fast as I could. From there I’d try and find out just what sort of trouble I was in.

That was, if I lived that long.

With my right hand I pulled back the left side of my coat, lifting it gently, and looked underneath. I could see just the beginning of a stain on the dark blue shirt I’d changed into. Soon it would soak through my coat and someone would notice it. I had a handkerchief in my pocket, and I got that out and slipped it inside my shirt, just under the stain. I had no way of holding it there, but so long as I kept still, it would stay in place.

Of course I didn’t know what was happening at my back. For all I knew the blood had already seeped through and stained my coat. That was all right so long as my back was against the seat, but it would be obvious as soon as I got up. I just had to hope there would be no interested people once I got to San Antone and tried to find a doctor.

I knew the bullet had come out my back. I knew it because I’d felt around and located the exit hole while I’d been hiding in the alley, using one shirt for a bandage and the other for a sop. Of course the hole in my back was bigger than the entrance hole the bullet had made. It was always that way, especially if a bullet hit something hard like a bone and went to tumbling or flattened out. I could have stuck my thumb in the hole in my back.

About the only good thing I could find to feel hopeful about was the angle of the shot. The bullet had gone in very near the bottom of my ribs and about six inches from my left side. But it had come out about only three or four inches from my side. That meant there was a pretty good chance that it had missed most of the vital stuff and such that a body has got inside itself. I knew it hadn’t nicked my lungs because I was breathing fine. But there is a whole bunch of other stuff inside a man that a bullet ain’t going to do a bit of good. I figured it had cracked a rib for sure because it hurt to breathe deep, but that didn’t even necessarily have to be so. It was hurting so bad anyway that I near about couldn’t separate the different kinds of hurt.

A more unlikely man than Phil Sharp to give me my seventh gunshot wound I could not have imagined. I had ended my career on the owlhoot trail with my body having lived through six gunshots. That, as far as I was concerned, had been aplenty. By rights I should have been dead, and there had been times when I had been given up for dead. But once off the outlaw path I’d thought my days of having my blood spilt were over. Six was enough.

And then Phil Sharp had given me my seventh. As a gambler I didn’t like the number. There was nothing lucky about it that I could see, and I figured that anything that wasn’t lucky had to be unlucky.

Part of my bad luck was because I was Wilson Young. Even though I’d been retired for several years, I was still, strictly speaking, a wanted man. And if anybody had cause to take interest in my condition, it might mean law—and law would mean trouble.

For that matter Phil Sharp and the three men he’d had with him might have thought they could shoot me without fear of a murder charge because of the very fact of my past and my uncertain position with regard to the law, both local and through the state. Hell, for all I knew some of those rewards that had been posted on my head might still be lying around waiting for someone to claim them. It hadn’t been so many years past that my name and my likeness had been on Wanted posters in every sheriff’s office in every county in Texas.

I had gone to see Phil Sharp because he’d left my gambling house owing me better than twenty thousand dollars. I didn’t, as an ordinary matter, advance credit at the gambling tables, but Sharp had been a good customer in the past and I knew him to be a well-to-do man. He owned a string of warehouses along the docks in Galveston, which was the biggest port in Texas. The debt had been about a month old when I decided to go and see him. When he’d left Del Rio, he’d promised to wire me the money as soon as he was home, but it had never come. Letters and telegrams jogging his memory had done no good, so I’d decided to call on him in person. It wasn’t just the twenty thousand; there was also the matter that it ain’t good policy for a man running a casino and cathouse to let word get around that he’s careless about money owed him. And in that respect I was still the Wilson Young it was best not to get too chancy with. Sharp knew my reputation, and I did not figure to have any trouble with him. If he didn’t have the twenty thousand handy, I figured we could come to some sort of agreement as to how he could pay it off. I had wired him before I left Del Rio that I was planning a trip to Houston and was going to look in on him in Galveston. He’d wired back that he’d be expecting me.

I saw him in his office in the front of one of the warehouses he owned down along the waterfront. He was behind his desk when I was shown in, getting up to shake hands with me. He was dressed like he usually was, in an expensive suit with a shiny vest and a big silk tie. Sharp himself was a little round man in his forties with a kind of baby face and a look that promised you could trust him with your virgin sister. Except I’d seen him without the suit and vest, chasing one of my girls down the hall at four o’clock in the morning with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and the handle to his hoe in the other. I’d also seen him at the poker table with sweat pouring off his face as he tried to make a straight beat a full house. It hadn’t then and it probably never would.

He acted all surprised that I hadn’t gotten my money, claiming he’d mailed it to me no less than a week ago. He said, I got to apologize for the delay, but I had to use most of my ready cash on some shipments to England. Just let me step in the next room and look at my canceled checks. I’d almost swear I saw it just the other day. Endorsed by you.

Like I said, he looked like a man that might shoot you full of holes in a business deal, but not the sort of man who could use or would use a gun.

He got up from his desk and went to a door at the back, just to my right. I took off my coat and laid it over the arm of the chair, it being warm in the office. I was sitting kind of forward on the chair, feeling a little uneasy for some reason. It was that, but it was mainly the way Sharp opened the back door that probably saved my life. When you’re going through a door, you pull it to you and step to your left, toward the opening, so as to pass through. But Sharp pulled open the door and then stepped back. In that instant, I slid out of the chair I was sitting in and down to my knees. As I did, three men with hoods pulled over their heads came through the door with pistols in their hands. Their first volley would have killed me if I’d still been sitting in the chair. But they fired at where I’d been, and by the time they could cock their pistols for another round, I had my revolver in my hand and was firing. They never got off another shot; all three went down under my rapid-fire volley.

Then I became aware that Phil Sharp was still in the room, just by the open door. I was about to swing my revolver around on him when I saw a little gun in his hand. He fired, once, and hit me in the chest. I knew it was a low-caliber gun because the blow of the slug just twitched at my side, not even knocking me off balance.

But it surprised me so that it gave Sharp time to cut through the open door and disappear into the blackness of the warehouse. I fired one shot after him, knowing it was in vain, and then pulled the trigger on an empty chamber.

I had not brought any extra cartridges with me. In the second I stood there with an empty gun, I couldn’t remember why I hadn’t brought any extras, but the fact was that I was standing there, wounded, with what amounted to a useless piece of iron in my fist. As quick as I could, expecting people to suddenly come bursting in the door, I got over to where the three men were laying on the floor and began to check their pistols to see if they fired the same caliber ammunition I did. But I was out of luck. My revolver took a. 40-caliber shell; all three of the hooded men were carrying. 44-caliber pistols.

Two of the men were dead, but one of them was still alive. I didn’t have time to mess with him, but I turned him over so he could hear me good and said, Tell Phil Sharp I ain’t through with him. Nor your bunch either.

Then I got out of there and started making my way for the train depot. At first the wound bothered me hardly at all. In fact at first I thought I’d just been grazed. But then, once outside, I saw the blood spreading all over the front of my shirt and I knew that I was indeed hit. I figured I’d been shot by nothing heavier than a .32-caliber revolver but a .32 can kill you just as quick as a cannon if it hits you in the right place.

The men I’d shot were members of the Galveston Citizen’s Vigilante Committee. I knew that because Phil Sharp had been bragging about it the last time he’d been in Del Rio. He’d bragged that he’d organized it and was the leader and that the committee was more powerful than any other form of law in all of Galveston. He’d even told me about the hoods they wore. Said his was black because he was the head honcho.

So I hadn’t just shot three men; I’d shot three members of a law and order organization that might or might not have been legal. And if the men were, indeed, considered law, it wasn’t going to make a hairpin’s worth of difference that I’d shot them in self-defense. Galveston, it seemed, was a rough town on account of all the sailors from different countries and different ports. Sharp had said most of the sailors were rough trade and that they’d caused so many killings and holdups and beatings and such that the local law couldn’t handle them. He and other important men in the shipping business had decided that something had to be done so they organized the vigilante committee.

But it appeared to me that Mr. Sharp wasn’t above using his committee for something other than good works for the city. I wondered if the man I’d only wounded would pass on my words to Mr. Sharp that our business wasn’t concluded. I had gut-shot the man, and he might not live to pass on any messages.

As I might not live to do much of anything, if I didn’t get some relief soon. My whole left side was now on fire and throbbing so that I figured anybody looking would be able to see the beat of the pounding pain. And I was starting to feel more and more weak, a sure sign I was losing too much blood and a sure sign I’d be a walking advertisement, as soon as I got off the train, of a man who’d been shot. That was going to cause just some little curiosity, people being what they were.

And I was armed with an empty revolver and no extra cartridges. The reason I had not brought along any extra ammunition was that I’d taken too long saying good-bye to Evita, the woman who ran the bordello part of my operation, and whom I thought of as my girlfriend—or at least my main girlfriend. As a consequence I’d rushed my packing, and the box of cartridges I’d meant to bring was still sitting on top of the bureau in the bedroom of my ranch house in Mexico, just across the river from Del Rio.

About then the conductor came walking through the car. He said, Bay City, Bay City, next stop. Bay City, ten minutes. Bay City, ten minutes.

I thought, Only to Bay City. Only sixty miles. And God knew how much further to the junction where the train switched lines to head for San Antonio. Of course I could get off in Bay City and try and find some help. Maybe they had a whorehouse, and I could get one of the girls to fix me up. Give her a few dollars and at least get bandaged up so I wouldn’t be showing blood through my clothes.

But I didn’t know if they had a whorehouse in Bay City. Besides, all whores weren’t good-hearted. In fact, some of the meanest women I’d ever met had been whores.

I wondered if I had any friends in Bay City. I couldn’t remember any. It seemed like all my friends were as far away from me as I was from them.

I began to notice I was feeling a little feverish. I put my palm to my forehead and felt it clammy with sweat. It was becoming damn clear I was going to have to do something and in pretty short order.

I had lost weight since my outlaw days. I didn’t know how that had worked out, but it had. Back a few years I’d been about six foot tall and weighed 190 pounds. I was still six foot tall, but now my weight had dropped to 175, and that had been muscle. I couldn’t figure it. In my owlhoot days I’d never done no what you might call physical work. The heaviest thing I ever lifted was somebody else’s money. But once I’d given it up and sort of settled down, I’d began to drop muscle. It was a thought to ponder on. My eyes were another. Sometimes they were gray and sometimes green. I could never be sure which color they’d be when I got up in the morning. A rich woman had once told me I was handsome in an unimportant way. I hadn’t understood what she’d meant by that, but I’d figured that any woman who could get rich on her own without either stealing or going on her back must be pretty smart. I had taken to using it after that. The only surviving member of my gang was a black Mexican named Chulo. He was, without a doubt, the meanest-looking, ugliest Mexican outlaw you ever saw. I used to tell him he was ugly in an unimportant way. He didn’t understand it either.

But I damn sure knew I wished I had him with me right then and there. But he was back in Del Rio watching the store. Chulo wasn’t very smart, but he was hell for loyal.

The train began slowing and then slowed some more and finally jolted to a stop. The conductor come through again saying, Bay City, Bay City, all out for Bay City.

The jolt hadn’t done my side no good, but the stillness of the car after all the swaying and shifting was a relief. Across the aisle the spinsterish woman got up and got her little carpetbag valise off the overhead rack and went down the aisle. It was a temptation to get up and follow her, but I figured if her kind lived in the town, I wouldn’t make it five steps before I got throwed in jail. Give a man a dirty look for taking a drink when his whole side was on fire. She reminded me of my old-maid aunt back in Corpus Christi who’d raised me after my parents had died. Or at least she’d thought she was raising me. In actual fact I’d been handling most of that job myself. But I was grateful to her for one thing: She’d been a schoolteacher, and one way or the other, she’d kept me in school through the tenth grade. I hadn’t appreciated it at the time, but I’d come to later in life when I could see what benefit an education was to a man. Of course it hadn’t helped much robbing banks, but it had put me a cut above most of the other riffraff I was running with and had consequently brought me some respect before I’d begun to earn it with a revolver.

I took advantage of the stillness of the train to have another pretty good pull off the whiskey bottle. It helped a little, but I was more worried about the way I was feeling feverish and faint. I didn’t know how long it took for a gunshot wound to get infected, but I didn’t reckon it was long. And then there was the matter of all the blood I was losing. The hole in the front of my chest had maybe clotted, but I doubted damn serious that the exit wound was going to close itself without some medical help. I moved a little against the seat, trying to see what would happen if I eased off the pressure I’d been holding against my back, holding it tight against the seat in hopes it would help stop the bleeding. All the movement did was make the wound start throbbing anew.

Pretty soon the train started up, and the first jolt, as the couplings between the cars took up slack, damn near fetched me. I sucked in air through my gritted teeth and just kind of steeled myself against the pain. I thought of the distance ahead to San Antonio and the time that would be involved. It was a long way and a lot of hours. And even after the train got there, there was going to be the problem of getting to a doctor or some kind of infirmary or a hotel or a friend’s house.

And, all of a sudden, I knew I just wasn’t going to last. I was either going to pass out before then or I was going to bleed to death. I was going to have to do something, and I was going to have to do it the next opportunity.

It all made me angry as hell. I reckoned a man couldn’t remember pain, and I ought to know, but it